Gracie Abrams announces third album ‘Daughter From Hell,’ out July 17 via Interscope. Lead single ‘Hit the Wall’ drops May 14
Gracie Abrams has been hiding something behind three letters. For weeks, the singer-songwriter seeded cryptic “DFH” references across her Instagram, tucking the initials onto stickers, journal covers, and studio snapshots alongside long time collaborator Aaron Dessner. On Monday morning, May 11, she finally let it land: “Daughter From Hell“ is her third album, arriving July 17 via Interscope Records, and the first single “Hit the Wall“ drops this Thursday, May 14.
The announcement came with characteristically unguarded energy. “Whoa whoa whoa,” Abrams wrote in her caption. “Freaking out. I am so ready for it to be years.” The album was written and co-produced with Dessner, the National guitarist and production force whose fingerprints are across both of her previous records, 2023’s “Good Riddance” and 2024’s “The Secret of Us.” Their sessions, she told Billboard, were carved out between tour dates: “Aaron and I are catching each other in these little pockets between hectic times. Every day that I live with the music, things start to become a little clearer.”
From the Met Gala to a New Chapter
Abrams previewed what “Hit the Wall” means to her while attending the Met Gala. “It’s the introduction to this new chapter,” she said, “and I feel grateful and relieved that this is the introduction. I love the song so much and I love the people I made it with and it feels embodied and that feels good. So I’m excited for it to belong to everyone else.” She had previously told fans on May 1, when the single’s arrival date was first confirmed, that she loves it “with everything I have.”
The stakes heading into “Daughter From Hell” are real. “The Secret of Us” peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and hit No. 1 in the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Netherlands. Its tracks “I Love You, I’m Sorry” and “That’s So True” each surpassed one billion streams on Spotify. The album also included “Us,” her collaboration with Taylor Swift, which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. For an artist whose audience has grown at a pace that would unsettle most, the pressure to follow it is not small.
‘Definitely My Favorite Music I’ve Ever Made’
Abrams, for her part, sounds unbothered. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter in January, she was direct:
It’s definitely my favorite music I’ve ever made, and I feel very closely connected to it. I appreciate so much that these albums are time capsules of where I’m at in my life at any given point, but right now it does feel very like me. I hope that whoever finds it, connects with it and that they make it theirs when it’s out one day”
The album, which pre-save data on Apple Music suggests runs to 16 tracks, arrives in a summer already crowded with major releases. But Abrams has never been a musician who fights for space by being loud. Her instinct is to go inward, to find the small, precise detail that cracks something wide open. If what she and Dessner have built this time matches the confidence she’s bringing to the announcement, “Daughter From Hell” may well be the record that moves her from breakthrough artist to something more permanent.
Beyond music, Abrams is also set to make her acting debut in “Please,” an A24 film directed by Halina Reijn, where she will star alongside Tom Burke.
